Open Access Institutional Repositories (OA IRs):

Leadership, Direction and Launch

Two one-day workshops, one a tutorial on practice, one a symposium on policy,
held back-to-back provide a comprehensive overview of Open Access
Institutional Repositories (OA IRs) in the UK,
organised by the JISC EPrints and TARDis projects and the School of Electronics
and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

Background

2005 is poised to be a breakthrough year for Open Access Institutional
Repositories in
the UK. JISC is set to announce a major call for projects on Institutional
Repositories (JISC 2004). Following the lead of the
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoC 2004)
—
which recommended mandating author-institution self-archiving of all UK-funded research output,
as did the Congress-endorsed open-access plan now being implemented
by the National Institutes of Health in the USA (NIH 2004)
as well as by the Wellcome Trust
—
the eight UK research councils are now considering how to increase access to UK research output.
Open Access Institutional Repositories (OA IRs)
are critical in supplementing existing access to peer-reviewed journals.

To prepare UK universities and research institutions fully for these developments, the University
of Southampton is offering two free one-day workshops, the first a tutorial
on the practical details of setting up and running an Open Access IR,
the second a symposium on policy implementation and future
developments, particularly in the UK. The two workshops are independent
and being held consecutively so that participants can attend one or both.

The University of Southampton is the home of both the
GNU EPrints software,
the most widely used software for building Open Access Institutional
Repositories (Crow),
and the JISC TARDis project, which has been investigating the
technical, cultural and academic issues which surround OA IRs
(Swan 2004).

Southampton recently
became the first university in the UK to announce that it is transforming
its OA repository from the status of an experiment to an integral part of
the research infrastructure of the institution (University
of Southampton 2004);
we hope our accumulated experience will prove useful to other institutions planning a similar transition.

Who should attend

The meetings are aimed at all those responsible for initiating, directing,
managing and implementing OA repositories at large institutions, especially
research-led universities, and those planning large-scale OA projects.
Delegates can join for either day or both:

Day 1 (January 25th): will involve hands-on practical sessions
on building OA repositories and attracting content, and will appeal especially
to repository administrators and those offering technical support for repositories.
Some of this material has been presented in successful international workshops on IRs
in India and Brazil. There will also be sessions on integrating the role
of IRs with RAE reporting, e-science, marketing, education and training.
The meeting is free, so those attending the first day are welcome to stay
on for the second day.

Day 2 (January 26th): will also appeal to institutional leaders
and repository managers, and will feature speakers who are influential
in, and have key insights into, forthcoming UK policy developments.